


Promises

by servantofclio



Series: Branwen Lavellan [8]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-11-10
Packaged: 2018-04-30 22:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5181455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Solas avoids making her promises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Promises

Solas tried to avoid making her promises. Promises were too weighty, too dangerous to take lightly. Promises and duties and responsibilities were what had gotten him to the current pass, had they not? He lied, when he had to, and he skirted the truth, but he would not make promises he had no intention of keeping.

It was tempting sometimes. During quiet dawns by the campfire, or evenings by the fire in Skyhold. There was one such evening, when she stirred in her piles of wool blankets and said drowsily, “What would you like to do, when all of this is over?”

Solas went still, and she continued, “I think I’d like to just… stop. Find someplace quiet to live. A cottage in the woods. Or travel, maybe. No entourage, no court. Simple. Something like that. What do you think?”

He stayed quiet as her hand found his, and then he managed to say, “That sounds lovely.”

She sighed, and her grip loosened as she drifted to sleep, leaving Solas in thought. When all of this over. Words that meant something different to him than they meant to her. When his work was accomplished, there would likely be no peaceful cottages, for either one of them. She was nearly asleep, he told himself, and might not even remember the conversation. She would certainly not take it as a promise.

She had made him a promise, though, nearly the first time they had talked. She had promised to guard him from templars, if he so required, and Solas had stopped and stared, entirely thrown off. She meant it, he could tell; she was entirely sincere, her gaze level and earnest, and he could hardly fathom it. A free and true offer to put her safety, what influence she had, at stake for his own safety, and when they were hardly more than acquaintances? He could not recall anyone treating him with such forthright regard in all the time since he had awakened. Before, when he wore the mantle of the Wolf, no one would have thought him in need of such guarding, but Branwen Lavellan knew none of that, treated him as someone who might need her protection.

It gave him pause. He had wondered at her before: who was this woman who had wrecked Corypheus’ plans (while Corypheus went about wrecking Solas’ own)? Unconscious in her cell in Haven, she had seemed a fragile vessel, racked by the magic she had inadvertently taken; one who wore her slave markings in the prideful ignorance of the Dalish, who stumbled through the world unseeing, as all of this world did.

But awake and alert and standing on her own two feet, he was caught by those clear eyes, and it dawned on him that this Lavellan was someone to be reckoned with, in her own right. It was perhaps the first moment that jarred him, since his disastrous awakening, that made a thought whisper in his ear that perhaps he did not understand these people at all.

He did not make her a promise, to answer hers, but he thanked her. He watched her, after, with sharpened interest.

He told her that he would help to defeat Corypheus, and that much was truth. He found, as time went on, as he came to care for her, that he avoided promising anything to her more assiduously. He might have lied more freely to a lesser soul, one of the incomplete people he had assumed must populate this broken world. But to her– no. She was too bright, too steadfast, too true, and he would not bring her false promises and flattery, even if he dared not bring her all the truth.

He thought, as he turned his back on the Inquisition and walked away from Haven, that the Evanuris would laugh to see him now, heart twisted with longing for a woman he could never be with, not as she would have wished.

He could not even promise himself that he would forget her, in time. He knew too well that that, too, would be a lie.


End file.
